EXPERIENCE OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION OF THE RUSSIAN READER IN A LITERARY RETROSPECTIVE

EXPERIENCE OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION OF THE RUSSIAN READER IN A LITERARY RETROSPECTIVE

* translated into English with an online translation service, the original text can be found here

An excursion into the history of child and youth self-determination practices shows that they are absolutely dependent on the socio – cultural situation, and the current one against their background is unique and has no analogues in the past. We will prove this by the example of the texts of Russian literature, which we will consider as a kind of sublimation of psychological difficulties of a person and a way of his adaptation to the challenges of time. In the highly literaturocentric Russian culture, literary texts are quite representative of such projections.

In a Patriarchal society, the laws of stable cultural transmission worked, which is evident from the example of ancient Russian texts that captured the medieval worldview. The problem of infantile consciousness contradicting the dominant values is not articulated in them. Perhaps for the first time this contradiction is reflected in household stories of the XVII century, and the problem of “fathers” and “children” there is solved differently, depending on the position of the author (in “the Tale of Woe-Woe” wins the morality of Domostroy, and in “the Story of Frol Skobeyev”-the morality of “new man”).

Problems of self-identification become relevant in Peter’s time, marked by the breakdown of the cultural paradigm. True, the fictitious texts of this period do not directly depict the adolescent consciousness, but the very theme of choosing a life path that does not repeat the father’s is already present (“History of the Russian sailor Vasily Koriotsky…”). It is present – as an edification of the “fathers” – and in the regulating cultural texts (“youth is an honest mirror, or an indication of everyday behavior…”).

Recall that the child at this time has not yet become a significant social subject – it is rather a passive object of education. We also remind that children’s literature as a special territory of literature, where specific “children’s” tasks of growing up are solved, also does not exist yet.

The EIGHTEENTH century is truly a turning point in the context of our theme: the problem of education is the main educational problem – it becomes Central in all its varieties: in a direct sense (the image of the ignoramus Mitrofanushka in the Comedy D. I. Povidine), civic (A. N. Radishchev), finally, the value “education of the soul” (the entire sentimentalism).

We emphasize the key role of N. M. Karamzin’s literary, life – creating and cultural activities in shaping generations of readers. The book this time and will become an important cultural model for the younger man, and the behavior of a literary character – a role model (almost like the medieval reader’s hagiographic literature). The subsequent period of the flourishing of Russian literature brought many brilliant examples of this kind.

At the same time, the literature of the “Golden age” reliably captured the experience of adolescent reflection on the topic ” how to live?» and ” to make a life with whom?”, which defined the plot and became a kind of topos: let’s remember” the Captain’s daughter “(1836) by A. S. Pushkin,” the Little hero “(1857) by F. M. Dostoevsky,” First love “(1860) by I. S. Turgenev, ” Childhood. Boyhood. Youth” (1852-1856) by L. N. Tolstoy and others. About Tolstoy’s trilogy, we can even say that their author came to writing not for the sake of solving aesthetic problems, but for the sake of understanding this personally significant for him – child and adolescent – experience, which became the beginning of conscious life-building.

The experience of the classics, which used to solve the problems of “fathers” and “children” and “what to do” on the pages of books and “grind” psychological and social experience into cult books for children and youth, was adopted by Soviet literature. “School stories” from Gaidar to the late Soviet-an example and proof of this.

Post-Soviet literature, which had ceased to be a preserve of ideas, lost its influence, partly giving way to cinema. The audiovisual has won over the verbal purely quantitatively – this is a reality to be reckoned with.

The identity of a modern teenager in the context of cultural pluralism is inevitably multiple, because it is formed under the influence of many factors – both transmitted by society (let’s call them repressive, in the fucoldian sense: this is traditional culture, educational standards, and the family “educational press”), and freely chosen. The latter are whimsical, diverse and uncontrolled, since they are determined by the interests of the growing person, and, according to the laws of repulsion from the experience of “fathers”, are often destructive in relation to their values. The Internet space in which this self-determination takes place is uncontrolled and inexhaustible, as are the strategies of self-identification themselves. The book occupies its modest place here-much compromised by its involvement in the school-educational canon.